Fear is a scientifically well-understood emotion that evolved to allow organisms to swiftly mobilize resources in times of need. Indeed, it is well-documented that organisms universally respond with fight, flight or freeze behavior when faced with actual or potentially dangerous situations. What is much less well understood is how fear becomes the engine in pleasurable activities—what could be termed “recreational fear.” Fear-seeking activities range from mildly scary children’s activities, such as playfully being chased by a parent or caregiver, to full-blown horror media, such as horror films and haunted attractions. Such media entertainment is both culturally pervasive and exceedingly popular. Recreational fear, in other words, is a widespread phenomenon that requires empirical investigation in its developmental, psychological, social, cultural and biological dimensions.
This Fifth Annual Aarhus Workshop on Recreational Fear brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and countries to provide a forum for dialogue about the state and future of recreational fear research.
Venue: Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
| Time | Presentation | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00-10:15 | Welcome | Recreational Fear Lab |
| 10:15-11:00 | “I just love myself a good murder!” Psychological Perspectives on People’s Fascination with True Crime | Corinna Perchtold-Stefan |
| 11:00-11:45 | Fearless or Fearlust? Psychopathic Personality Traits and Fear Enjoyment | Sabrina Schneider |
| 11:45-12:30 | Lunch | |
| 12:30-13:15 | Horror Media-Induced Intrusive Memories: From Scale Development to Field Validation | Madison LaSaga |
| 13:15-13:30 | Break | |
| 13:30-14:15 | The Paradox of Horror: Aversive Emotions Become Appealing | Kiss Botond László |
| 14:15-14:45 | Coffee break | |
| 14:45-15:30 | My Worries on Screen: Identifying the Relationship between Individual Concerns and Horror Enjoyment | Jarred Lorusso |
| 15:30-16:00 | Roundtable |
Dr. Corinna Perchtold-Stefan is a Senior Scientist in the Biological Psychology Lab at the Department of Psychology, University of Graz. Her research focuses more and more on the dark sides of human behavior, which includes violent media consumption in the digital age. In 2025, she published the paper “Out of the Dark- Psychological Perspectives of People’s Fascination with True Crime” as one of the first comprehensive psychological investigations of true crime consumption. She is currently also leading a research grant on malevolent creativity, which investigates how people use creativity to do harm to others (creative manipulation, aggression, crime).
Dr. Sabrina Schneider is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Personality Psychology, Legal Psychology, and Assessment at Germany’s largest public university, FernUniversität in Hagen. Among other topics, her research focuses on affective and cognitive anomalies related to socially aversive personality traits, in particular psychopathy and narcissism. Together with her former PhD student Miriam Hofmann she conducted and published a series of experimental studies testing the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis, which proposes that psychopathic individuals experience positive emotions during fear-evoking situations, leading them to increasingly seek potentially dangerous situations that naturally elicit fear experiences (e.g., criminal behavior, violent conflicts).
Madison LaSaga is a first-year Master of Science student in the NeuroFog Lab at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research investigates how individuals control unwanted memories, with a particular focus on horror media. Specifically, she examines the occurrence of intrusive memories of especially frightening scenes following exposure to horror content.
Botond László Kiss is a PhD candidate and an assistant research fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Pécs and in the Visual Cognition and Emotion Lab. His research focuses on fear and threat-related processes, with particular attention to specific phobias such as animal and blood-injury-injection phobias. He investigates how core attentional mechanisms, physiological responses, and personality traits shape the experience of fear. and disgust. He is also interested in horror media, where individuals intentionally expose themselves to frightening scenes, offering a contrasting perspective on how people evaluate threatening content.
Jarred M Lorusso is a cognitive neuroscientist and Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Brighton. His research has historically focused on the analysis and refinement of preclinical models for Schizophrenia, but his current research interests focus on identifying the benefits of, and motivations for, horror media consumption. This was specifically driven by his focus on data stratification and individual differences. He currently collaborates with the Recreational Fear Lab and supervises undergraduate research projects which look at horror and true crime enjoyment through a number of psychophysiological lenses.
Up to fifty percent of the population reportedly enjoy true crime – the juggernaut media genre about real, often brutal criminal cases such as homicides, sex crimes, kidnappings, or serial killers. With people often claiming that “you are what you stream” – should this concern us? Both science and the public have debated for decades how violent media consumption may change us for the worse – but what do we actually know about engagement with true crime? This talk discusses empirical research findings from several studies of my lab, using cross-sectional, daily diary, and neuroscience methods to help answer the following questions: Why do people engage with true crime content (motives), who are the true crime fans among us (traits), and does true crime consumption affect the way we think, feel, and behave (outcomes)? Along these lines, I will talk about frequency and motives for true crime consumption, also addressing why women seem to “love crime” in particular. I will present links of true crime consumption to fear of crime, personality, aggression, empathy, and emotion regulation, and further explore how true crime consumption may (or may not) change our emotions on a daily basis. In sum, my research seeks to answer a pressing question around people’s fascination with horror, evil, and crime: Is this a morbid, voyeuristic interest in violence and the suffering of others? Or could there also be adaptive motives and positive potentials?
Psychopathic traits are among the primary risk factors for violent delinquency and offense recidivism. Traditional etiological theories consider fear deficits—particularly reduced responsivity to threat—as predisposing emotional dysfunctions in psychopathy. According to the recently proposed Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis, however, psychopathic individuals do not necessarily show reduced responses to threat cues (i.e., low fear), but instead tend to experience fear-eliciting situations as rewarding and positive. Consequently, psychopathic individuals may increasingly seek potentially dangerous or threatening situations that naturally elicit fear experiences.
A series of experimental studies provides empirical support for the central tenets of the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis. Psychopathic personality traits, especially those ascribed to the interpersonal-affective dimension (e.g., callousness, deficient empathy, lack of remorse), facilitate behavioral approach toward threat cues and are associated with more positive appraisals of fear-inducing videos. Contradicting traditional fear-deficit theories, psychopathic individuals show increased heart rate while watching frightening videos. Importantly, heart-rate increases during these videos appear to have different meanings for individuals with high versus low levels of psychopathic traits: while in more psychopathic individuals, fear-induced heart-rate accelerations are linked with positive subjective experiences, they are associated with more negative subjective feelings in individuals with low levels of psychopathic traits.
In contrast to previous fear-deficit models, the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis offers a nuanced perspective on fear anomalies in psychopathy by acknowledging that fear is indeed experienced by psychopaths—but seems to be perceived in a different, appreciative manner.
While many enjoy the horror genre, some report particularly frightening scenes intruding into their mind for days, weeks, or even years following exposure to horror media. However, until now, no measure has existed to quantify the severity of these experiences. This presentation introduces the Severity of Horror Media-induced Intrusive Memories (SHMIM) scale, a novel instrument designed to assess the multifaceted nature of intrusive memories following horror media exposure. Our multinational, multidisciplinary team with expertise in recreational fear, cognitive psychology, and scale development created an initial 36-item pool by drawing on existing instruments measuring cognitive distress and unwanted repetitive thought. Initial factorial validity data was assessed using a dataset of 318 participants. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Exploratory Graph Analysis supported a five-factor structure: Cognitive Distress, Physiological Reactions, Vividness, Perceived Control, and Intentionality. The final model comprises 15 items (three per factor) with strong reliability coefficients. In terms of face-and-known groups validity, SHMIM subscale scores positively correlated with self-reported frequency and duration of intrusive memories, and non-fans scored significantly higher than horror fans on the SHMIM overall and all subscales except Intentionality. To further test the structural validity of the scale, a subsequent sample was collected at a Danish haunted house attraction. The scale was translated into Danish using forward and backward translations, with feedback solicited from the research team and bilingual speakers to ensure semantic equivalence. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis was conducted on this new sample of 240 participants, and the 5-factor model fit extremely well according to all conventional indices. Additionally, we investigated the frequency of intrusive memories following the haunted house experience using daily self-report measures. Credible predictors included days since the experience, subjective fear immediately after the experience, and total scores from the SHMIM scale, with participants reporting greater SHMIM scores exhibiting more frequent intrusions following the haunted house experience. The SHMIM scale provides a tool for studying the psychological impact of horror media consumption and offers a valuable instrument for broadly studying intrusive memories, including mechanisms underlying their formation and persistence.
Processing threatening content takes priority over neutral or other valences. This enables us to detect possible threats and dangers faster. This attentional bias is crucial in the activation of such neural processes that help us to avoid every possible danger. These processes can elicit behavioral responses and psychological changes (e.g., heightened arousal, but conscious emotions such as fear and disgust are also important in maintaining avoidance behavior. Horror movies deliberately rely on these evolutionarily relevant cues, repeatedly presenting familiar threats, so that they can trigger feelings of fear and disgust in a similar way. Despite their aversive nature, horror remains consistently popular and continues to attract growing audiences.
In our research, we investigated why individuals find horror content appealing even when it elicits negative emotional responses. We examined whether enjoyment and excitement represent distinct emotional experiences during horror consumption. Our results suggest that fear and disgust play different roles in excitement and enjoyment. We were also interested in whether these emotions differ across major horror subgenres. Although the horror category is often treated as a single genre, subgenres vary substantially in the types of threats, narrative structures, and emotional signatures they evoke.
Our findings contribute to a clearer understanding of how people experience fear- and disgust-based entertainment, what motivates them to seek threatening content, and which specific emotions characterize different horror subgenres.
Horror media is a heterogeneous genre which utilises a range of thematic and visual stimuli to invoke fear and discomfort in the audience. Research suggests that individuals seek out and enjoy horror media that conforms with their beliefs about the (supernatural) world, and that a subgroup of horror fans feel that the media may help them cope with feelings of distress in their lives. The current research project seeks to identify whether there is a thematic overlap between an individuals’ psychosocial concerns and the thematic or visual content that they enjoy in horror.
The workshop is organized by the Recreational Fear Lab with generous support from the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, and the Schoool of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.
